I took 2,700 photographs with the G1 X yesterday (with three batteries!) so it was inevitable that some would turn out. Most of my pictures attempting to capture hoverflies actually hovering consisted of out-of-focus flowers where the hovering fly simply took off as the shutter rolled. Anyone who says the G1 X chews into the battery too fast was probably using the built-in flash at the time because I can easily get 600 shots if shooting in short bursts and random single shots. I was in the city with my wife and some of her costuming student friends and we met at the botanical gardens... so I knew I'd find plenty of tiny bugs to photograph with the stacked Closeup Lenses on the G1 X.

I'm nowhere near finished sorting through the photographs but I did pick out some of my favorites to share. I haven't even gotten to the Bee pictures yet and I think I took more pictures of bees than anything else. Admittedly, bees are still the hardest things to photograph due to their erratic moments and unpredictable flight paths. I have just thrown out nearly 500 shots of "blurred bees" which moved out of the focus plane before I got the shot but nearly all the other critters came out just fine from caterpillars to birds. Bees have always been a tough subject for non-DSLR users. I've caught some nice shots of bees in the past but the angle and lack of movement at the time were important factors.

Dragonfly Resting
- Unlike the other pictures I've taken, this one is a 'stacked' image made from two photographs. Usually, macro photographers will use at least three and as many as 12 photographs to create the one image and increase the range of focus on the tiny subjects. I'd have like to have used three shots but I was leaning over a pond to catch this picture with one leg wrapped around a hand rail and my arm outstretched holding the camera to get the dragonfly in focus (the range of focus is very limited with two CU filters on the lens).

Impossible Shot
- tough to get a shot like this with manual focus (MF) I took 6 shots and shifted the lens towards and away from the Hoverfly as the camera fired a burst of pictures. Only this one was in focus.

Flower Spider
- She fled to the underside of the flower when I tried to shift her with my finger. This is when the G1 X's flip-LCD was absolutely essential because this flower was in a flowerbed amongst other plants and was almost touching the ground. You can see what the spider looked like sitting inside the flower, waiting for insects to visit here:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/146401900/original
Length of spider is about 9mm (under 1cm).